Taking a page from their novel video conferencing technology, iVisit spins off their technology to start a new service called LookTel which helps the visually impaired community identify and recognize objects, landmarks, tags, and text.
Doing all of this using video, the blind user can identify objects in real time instead of having to take photos and making sure they aim right. When I talked to the CEO about this, Orang Dialameh said “Using video was important to grab as many frames as possible to capture a good image for fast recognition.” Asking how this was done quickly over a phone, he said “it’s done by pairing the phone and connecting to a remote computer acting as the base station which helps aid in the processing of the image for recognition by using our ivisit video streaming solution”
Definitely a cool app that combines the needs of many features into one convenient application with built in accessibility
Here’s a video of the demo. To see them in action, visit their website at http://www.looktel.com
Who’s to blame in this mess? China says it’s Google who’s pulling the plug on authorization while Google had no comment on the postponement. Expect to see more news on this as it unfolds into other business units within Google.
BEIJING — Google on Tuesday postponed the launch of two mobile handsets in China, one week after threatening to leave the Asian giant over cyberattacks and censorship, Dow Jones Newswires reported.
The US company said in a statement to Dow Jones that the phones featuring Google’s Android operating system and developed in cooperation with Motorola and Samsung had been scheduled to be unveiled Wednesday with China Unicom.
The California-based Internet firm did not specify when or if the launch would take place.
A person familiar with the situation told Dow Jones the company felt it would be “irresponsible” to release the phones at the current time given the current uncertainty.
Representatives of Google were not immediately available to comment when contacted by AFP.
In another strange turn of events in the app approval process for the iPhone, Apple has given the green light to a new application that supposdly allows video recording on non iPhone 3Gs models. This means that the phone was not limited by hardware but software. For $0.99 cents, you can download an app that basically allows the same functionality as the iPhone 3GS for video recording. Hurray! One less reason to upgrade to the 3GS or jailbreak…
Read more about it here:
Available online directly from Google.com itself, this phone will deliver a complete Android 2.1 experience to new users with a powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. Look out Apple, this phone is going to knock your socks off… There is no contract and the device will be priced accordingly. This is a similar model to Sony Ericsson and Nokia but who knows, Google might actually change consumer buying habits…
The phone, called Nexus One, was designed inside Google and will be sold, at least initially, without being subsidized by a wireless partner, these people said. It is the latest sign of the Internet giant’s ever-broadening wireless ambitions as Google hunts for ways to expand its Internet services beyond computers. The move, details of which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal on … – Wall Street Journal
How scary is it when a phone company gives up your data (GPS mainly) to authorities without a warrant? Sprint! Wake up! This is a big potential disaster for a company already bleeding in the mobile market. 8 million requests in 13 months by law enforcement officers. Sprint is rumored to have over 110 employees whose sole purpose is to aide in this practice without warrant or permission from the user.
News broke like it was hot about a rumored video chat application approved on Apple. Now hold on one minute here… Didn’t we already invent this back in 2002? How does this become news AGAIN. Just because it works on an iPhone, it turned the industry upside down… I guess if it’s not on the iPhone, it never existed. Let me show you a company that already did this… secret post coming soon…
Fring—a free chat client for the iPhone that supports most standards—has been updated to support video conferencing on the iPhone, using Wi-Fi. It works on Fring to Fring, and Skype to Fring. Unfortunately, it’s not bi-directional. You would be able to see whoever is calling you from a desktop, but you won’t be able to transmit your image, even if you have the 3G videoconferencing kit. The reason is a physical one, according to the developer: The iPhone doesn’t have a front camera, so you can’t do face to face. – Gizmodo
This is really old news, can’t believe this is getting this much traction on popular sites like Engadget and MobileCrunch but Fring has released a new app that allows video chat on Symbian.
That might be about to change. The popular P2P VoIP service Fring has just announced that they have begun to add support for Skype video calls to their messaging client. Skype has hundreds of millions of users, and this service allows for mobile-to-desktop calls – in other words, mobile video chat finally has a chance at being useful and — more importantly — used. -MobileCrunch.com
If you’re looking for another company doing this, it’s iVisit. They not only do video chat but also multiparty video with up to 8 users. Think of them as skype but on steroids in the video space. I’m surprised not a lot of attention have been given to this company yet… Check them out at http://www.ivisit.com.
They have this software available on Windows Mobile phones. I think they have an iPhone app somewhere…. Apple can you open up the camera for them?
Adobe just took another stab towards a unified platform and introduced its most versatile version of its Flash Player to date. The newly announced Flash 10.1 software will be available “for smartphones, smartbooks, netbooks, PCs and other Internet-connected devices, allowing content created using the Adobe Flash Platform to reach users wherever they are.”
This is a huge deal representing a platform any developer can cater and build towards too which will work on just about any device out there that has it. Too bad iPhone won’t allow this leaving Apple in the dust when it comes to new innovation. Version 10.1 represents the first Flash iteration that will work on just about any computing device floating around (netbooks and smartphones will benefit greatly)
Can you tell which one is the real deal between the Tiger G3 and the HTC Hero? Does it even matter? I guess it does matter if you can’t run the original OS but with Android you see, it runs on anything for free. The only differentiating fact is the hardware which nowadays any manufacturer with a team can crank one out in hours. Welcome to the Tiger G3 a Hero knockoff but it has a front facing camera and some DTV features for you tv fans out there. $140 is a steal…. to pretend to be a Hero.
With Apple’s resounding success in their App Store, major carriers and phone manufacturers are jumping on the app store bandwagon to avoid being a “dump pipe” or just another hardware manufacturer. With loads of new app stores and new ways to download applications, this is by far a better user experience than in the past than having to browse from a clunky interface on the web and syncing it on the phone or downloading it from unfamiliar and risky 3rd party sites.
Now with everyone and their mother implementing an app store, developers are the last piece of the puzzle to develop and fill up their catalog. But what carriers and new app store promoters don’t realize in the resounding success of Apple’s App Store is that it was on a narrow target of mobile phones and operating systems. This alone cuts down on the difficulty of the developer to develop and maintain a stable and worthwhile experience of applications so that the end-user aka customer can enjoy and return for more. With Windows Mobile, Symbian, Brew, Java, Android, Apple, Blackberry, and other OS’s, it gets pretty overwhelming to maintain and update across all these different operating systems. Let’s say you narrowly focus on two or three OS’s, Apple, WM, and Android, you not only cut yourself off from 50% of the market but you also expand the number of phones and screen sizes to develop for. Apple’s success was that it was a homogeneous product of devices (iPhone and iTouch) with little deviation between the two.
My advice to these new app stores, don’t try to preload every phone with access to the app store. Only preserve it for the higher end phones that can handle this and narrow down the hardware that it can work universally without having to pressure developers to program specifically around for a particular phone.
